Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Ok i like talking about my Mod and especially repeating everything thousand of times , and often i forget so many things and aspects , so this post will clear hopefully all questions about my mod , shows side by side what has been changed , added or deleted so lets start with a Table of Contents:

1: Main UI

the second most hated thing in V2!

2: Sidebar

the most hated thing in V2!

3: Preferences

4: Other Stuff

including Skins , Colors , Customisation etc

Lets go!

1: Main UIThe main user interface in V2 is the reason for many people especially V2 haters to hate V2 even more , as it doesnt just only look grey in grey with a touch grey , no! it is also space consuming with very less information output and interaction possibilitys. Meaning that my goal is to fill in unused space with usefull options , buttons n stuff AND reduce overall Space usage at the same time! Lets begin with the Topbar... so lets start off with the first topbar , this is my Topbar with all functions and options enabled , you can see that all previous content of the original Topbar is still available and even more , the Menu´s "S21" "Edit" "World" etc have been moved into one big Main Menu called "S21" that gave me a HUGE amount of space to work with , so i decided to lift the Navigation Controls up to where the Menu´s were before. Back , Forth, Home , Sky and Water Preset Editor aswell as Land Info all of them are still there just pushed together , only thing i left was the Preferences Button , simply because its pointless up there. The Location Bar has been slighly changed to fit and auto resize the new overall size , so it will shrink on lower resolutions without overlapping with the other stuff. Now the interessting part , the "Customisation" part, this part contains the Draw Distance Slider for quick access to you render range with text entry possible , the search bar and the L$ status , all of them can be disabled (hidden) and will create more space for the Location bar to extend , except the L$ status which wont change the size of the Location bar at all, the last in this row is the Quick-Sound control panel which allows muting or editing master sound volume quickly if needed. The next row contains the Favourite bar which will reach over to the L$ status and then show >> if more fav´s have been added , followed by the clock and the Quick-Media control panel which allows quick and seperate control over active Media , the last 2 black rows are the network stats which show your actual upload and download activity. NOW my UI extends the whole thing into a new Row (again only if you want) which obselete´s the bottom buttons and brings back the top-middle action buttons like Inventory , Search , Map , Build and Snapshot for quick access. The bottombar itself had some minor and some major changes , the buttons now resize automatically to match the whole available space , or can be resized manually , there are also 2 new buttons and all of them can be switched between , show icon (like original Kirstens) , Full name (Like official Viewer) , and First letter (New) in Preferences - Viewer - UI Settings...

2: Sidebar

I know you hate it , many of you do , when not all , but in its core its such an usefull and quick drop-in/out menu which is also pretty small i think , those pesky big floaters from V1 were much bigger in most cases. Well my changes spread all over the Sidebar starting of that there is no (spoon)home button anymore! no more this stupid home button! its gone , forever, finally... instead the first button is your Profile now (yay) that means 1 button less , 40x40 pixels screen are again saved left one is the original, and on the right you see my modified one with one button less, better isnt it? ok then lets come to the Sidebar Menus which had a makeover too

we´ll see that in the next few pictures starting with the Profile , bigger Picture , button moved below it and Display name aswell as your real name moved onto top , looks better doesnt it?

then People , most people actuall doesnt realize that this is the Radar known from older Kirsten Viewers or whole other Viewers , it shows you distance , voice , typing and name aswell as real name (if you wish) , a quick inspector (miniprofile) if you click the small (i) Icon or directly his/her Profile (vcard Icon). In default it has the Minimap , which some people want seperatly and be disabled in People panel (not me) , so i added an Option (long before LL and Kirsten) to disable it and use the free space for the Radar list to extend, you can also resize it if you want. The range slider was also tweaked as you can see you are able to set it up to 4800m which would the whole SIM & more just in case....